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India wants to be in the Nuclear Club — that’s the bargaining chip for signing the Paris agreement.

India won’t ratify the Paris agreement unless it gets membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) a club that was, as it happens, set up in 1974 when a naughty India set off a nuclear test. But China is completely against India earning its NSG badge. So the big two population elephants on Earth and the monster carbon emitters are not so concerned about the future of Earth that they are going to put other rivalries aside. Priorities, indeed.

Pretty much every nation on Earth has signed up for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – except for India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea. In the NPT club there are five countries rated in the Platinum Frequent Flyer Bomb Class and the rest agree not to develop nuclear bombs but are (maybe) allowed to use nuclear power. Most of the few non-signers, like India, probably have bombs, but not the “license” for global bomb club membership. Now, China helps proliferate weapons in North Korea and Pakistan so it’s a tad rich that it claims to be afraid the NPT will fall apart if they [...]

Watch the pea. What does it mean to have a non-binding non-treaty, at the same time as a real “commitment”? It’s all semantics, and, as usual, word games are the weapons of big-bureaucrats. Don’t be fooled into thinking Paris was no threat to the free West.

As I keep saying, the climate conference in Paris was not trying to reduce CO2 or change the climate. The real aim is an endless free lunch for freeloaders. The Politicites didn’t get the legally binding agreement they dream of, but what they got may turn out to be almost as good. Marlo Lewis explains it may yet be politically binding on the target rich Western nations, which is all that really matters. It’s the best strategic review I’ve seen of what happened in Paris.

It was no accident that it was “non-binding”. That was part of the plan.

They were never going to get a legal treaty through the US Congress, so the aim became a deal that was “non-binding” and not a “treaty” because things that are overtly legal have to go through Congress. Instead, the bureaucrat class want to go around the voters. By simply declaring that Obama’s promises mean [...]

COP21 won’t get a meaningful agreement, but they will get “breakthrough success”

Don’t think China, India and Russia can save us. They won’t give up fossil fuels in a meaningful way, but they all have a price and buying them off is a lot cheaper than you might think. That’s because the goal is not for them to reduce CO2, but only for them to give the appearance of doing so.

It’s not about CO2, but about PR

Paris is a theatre– a grand show, and China’s Vice Foreign Minister Liu Jianmin said as much. He “laughed when the ‘High Ambition Coalition’ was mentioned. “It is a kind of performance,” he said, “It makes no difference.”

The 1.5C “high ambition” target is a perfect PR win. The Green Machine will be able to claim a major success getting X number of countries to sign up for a breakthrough pledge to do something “more ambitious”, something that “far exceeded our hopes” but that is really decades away and likely to happen even if nobody did anything at all. It’s the do nothing, unaccountable promise that politicians love to make.

All three nations have publicly poured cold water on the Paris solutions, but view [...]

You will never guess. Not only does no one care if carbon credits don’t cut carbon emissions, but hardly anyone cares if so called climate money is even spent on the climate. As many as 66% of climate projects funded by the developed world have nothing to do with “climate vulnerability”.

It’s the bragging game — politicians want to make out they are doing a lot for the climate, but there’s barely any accountability to check whether they get value for money — by how many thousandths of a degree did that policy cool the world? So they inflate their spending promises by claiming random other projects are “climate projects” or they use accounting trickery.

University of Zurich’s Axel Michaelowa, who studies climate aid grants, found “there was a huge misrepresentation. Governments were actually really not able to report properly” on aid that was supposed to help countries reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

His study, conducted on specific climate grants four years ago, showed a list of “projects without any conceivable climate change connotation,” such as Belgium funding for a “love movie festival” in the early 2000s in Africa, a [...]

If only we had more electric cars and windmills, lives could’ve been saved.

Ponder that air conditioners can cause people to do random acts of murder. They might keep people in the room calmer, but outside that pollution* travels, heats the world, and lo, a terrorist is made.

(Call me a skeptic, but I tend to think that if we turn off all the air-conditioners (or run them on solar power, which is almost the same thing) we might get more acts of terror rather than less, but what would I know?) Bernie Sanders says that we should stop terrorists by reducing our carbon emissions. Somehow, there were people who did not laugh at him.

Time Magazine : “Why Climate Change and Terrorism Are Connected”

Drought in Syria has contributed to instability

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders used the terrorist attacks in Paris to call for action to address climate change at a primary debate Saturday. But, while the plea attracted ridicule across the political spectrum, many academics and national security experts agree that climate change contributes to an uncertain world where terrorism can thrive.

U.S. military officials refer to climate change as a “threat multiplier” [...]

Paris is under seige — Multiple terrorists arrived with AK 47s and bombs strapped to themselves in six separate attacks. The latest toll is 153 127 dead, and France has closed its borders. Our thoughts go out to the victims of these pointless atrocities, to all of their friends and families, and to all of France, in shock.

The Bataclan concert hall was attacked and people taken hostage, “at least 112″ killed. A SWAT team arrived and over 100 hostages were released. A suicide bomber attacked the Stade de France (the national stadium). President Holland had to be evacuated. There are gun attacks as well. There are reports of 14 people killed by gunshot at Le Petit Cambodge, a Cambodian restaurant.

Does Ove Hoegh-Guldberg know something about Paris that hasn’t been announced?

Last week his office sent out an email to all pollies, inviting them to a propaganda event for the climate machine (all paid for by the taxpayer, as usual). Not only were we told that Greg Hunt apparently supports this event (whatever that means), we are also told that

“leading Australian climate scientists will discuss the impact of Australia’s decision to sign the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and the upcoming COP21.”

That sentence is ambiguous, but potentially loaded. We definitely have decided to endorse the UN goals for 2030 (whatever that means, and who knows?). Julie Bishop did it last week. But have we also decided to sign the Paris agreement? That would be news. Either Ove is forward projecting his fantasies, or he’s just let slip something that Hunt told him privately.

Who knows what is on offer at Paris anyway? I think the real scandal is that Australians have no idea what either the UN goals or the Paris document means. The nation ought to get to look at the fine print before anything is signed. How much sovereign power will Bishop and Turnbull give away to unelected UN bureaucrats?

Time to revisit the revealing quote from Ottmar Edenhoffer, IPCC leader in November 2010. He candidly said that climate policy was about redistributing wealth and has almost nothing to do with the environment. He also admitted countries who don’t sign up will be better off (so much for all the talk about creating green jobs). To give some sense of the scale of wealth transfer he described the up and coming UNFCCC Cancun meeting as “not a climate conference” but “one of the largest economic conferences since WWII”.

In 2010, ten thousand people went to Cancun. On November 30th, 50,000 people are expected to attend Paris COP21.

h/t to Egor the one. Image assembled by Cyrus Manz.

h/t to Egor the one. The creator: Cyrus Manz.

Ottmar Edenhofer is co-chair of the IPCC Working Group III. He did this interview in German in the lead up to Cancun, 2010 and GWPF translated it.

“Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. [...]

Frustrated by slow progress in global climate talks, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon plans to invite around 40 world leaders including President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to a closed- door meeting next month.

The meeting will take place in New York on September 27, a day ahead of the UN general assembly, said three people with knowledge of the matter. Ban also plans to invite French President Francois Hollande, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, as well as Chinese leaders, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorised to speak to the media.

The bonanza of money and power on offer in Paris is so large that nothing will be left to chance. The industry is worth $1.5 trillion a year already. Laws about energy use cut across every part of the [...]

Sydney Morning Herald/Age serves their subscribers up a few. Apart from “Myth 1″ below, Adam Morton avoids answering the most important points skeptics are making, but offers up some secondary bit and pieces. He supplies vague wordy answers announcing definitive conclusions based on irrelevant, motherhood type reasoning, non-sequiteurs, and little research: it’s just what we’ve come to expect from a Fairfax “investigation”.

“Myth 1″: The new climate target will be difficult to meet

Adam’s has four arguments (3 irrelevant, 1 wrong) to convince us it will be easy. I’ve paraphrased the wordy stuff. His arguments are so weak, the marvel here is that our national conversation is so irrational. “Not even trying” as they say.

Lo, behold, it will be “easy” to cut our carbon emissions by 26%, because:

1. The last small target we set for 2020 of a “5%” cut was less than other countries are achieving.

Jo says: There’s a reason our target was smaller. Australia’s population is growing faster (proportionally), our distances are larger, population density smaller, our largest export earner is “coal”, and some of our other exports have “energy” built in (so the carbon emissions occur in [...]